Day 4 - IFA International

Exclusive Interview HSA

Exclusive Interview HSA Keynote Signals Profound Change Ahead Voice and gesture recognition will drive the future of computing says Phil Rogers, President of Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) and Corporate Fellow of AMD. Rogers made his comments at Friday’s keynote on the next era of computing innovation. Tablets and other gadgets will react to touch, gestures, body language and eye contact, said Rogers, and in the future physical contact with computing devices would be a thing of the past. “We’re heading for a world where we take our hands off the touchscreen glass,” said Rogers, highlighting the paradox of users viewing touchscreens that are smudged with fingerprints. AMD Defines the Future The user experience will be more natural and immersive Phil Rogers Corporate Fellow of AMD Rogers outlined a computing system that could learn from a user’s routine, react to whether they were smiling or not, where on the display they were looking and respond to cues such as voice and gesture. Such a system could offer up a search result, he said. If the user was then perceived to be smiling at this result, the system would learn from that reaction to better shape future suggestions. During the keynote, Rogers referred to several public additions to the Foundation, the most notable of which is Samsung. The Korean electronics giant’s quiet addition to the Foundation’s roster suggests it is keen to participate in the Foundation’s vision for better parallel processing in mobiles and PCs. Rogers’ keynote included a number of demonstrations. These included Apical Limited’s demo of Assertive Display, a technology that delivers a high-quality viewing experience even in bright sunshine and enables dramatic reductions in display power consumption. As the viewing conditions change, sophisticated digital processing adjusts each pixel individually in real time. As Corporate Fellow with AMD, Phil Rogers is well placed to assess the pace of change in the consumer IT marketplace. Rogers spoke to IFAInternational about the profound changes ahead… In what areas are we likely to see major innovation over the next three to five years? One word — immersion. The world of communication is going to become more natural and fluent as we move to a world of natural user interface and immersion. Do you think it is possible to make 'early adoption' a mainstream habit? I think early adoption is already becoming mainstream. Smartphones took off faster than MP3 players. Tablets took off much faster than smartphones. Being an early adopter is not as scary as it used to be. What new materials are likely to be used to turbocharge processors? This is actually a misconception. What has propelled the amazing advances in computing over the last several years has been improvements in micro-architecture. So that’s the addition of accelerators, our relentless drive to lower power, the introduction of cloud services and, of course, better software up and down the stack. TV manufacturers are major challengers for bringing TV into the multi-function device area. What would be your remedy? TVs and PCs are clearly on a convergence course. Some platform standardisation seems inevitable in this area. Do you have a general message for the IT and CE industries as to how they should proceed? We are in a golden age of technology and the opportunities are enormous. The keys to the future are open standards to drive large ecosystems, improving the user experience to make it more natural and immersive, and driving down power consumption. This is exactly why AMD and its partners came together to define the Heterogeneous System Architecture. Hall 17 Stand 116 “The keys to the future are open standards to drive large ecosystems, improving the user experience to make it more natural and immersive” 22